Philip Reeves

Philip Reeves is an award-winning international correspondent covering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Reeves has spent two and half decades working as a journalist overseas, reporting from a wide range of places including the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Asia.

He is a member of the NPR team that won highly prestigious Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University and George Foster Peabody awards for coverage of the conflict in Iraq. Reeves has been honored several times by the South Asian Journalists' Association.

Reeves has been covering South Asia for more than 10 years. He has traveled widely in Pakistan and India, taking NPR listeners on voyages along the Ganges River and the ancient Grand Trunk Road.

Reeves joined NPR in 2004, after 17 years as a international correspondent for the British daily newspaper, The Independent. During the early stages of his career, he worked for BBC radio and television after training on the Bath Chronicle newspaper in western Britain.

Over the years, Reeves has covered a wide range of stories - from Boris Yeltsin's erratic presidency, the economic rise of India, the rise and fall of Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf, conflicts in Gaza and the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Reeves holds a degree in English Literature from Cambridge University. His family originates from Christchurch, New Zealand.

A strange new shrine has appeared on the eastern edge of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, amid the low hills that roll towards the Himalayan mountains.

Within a small gazebo, crowned by a green dome, there is a grave, decorated with silver tinsel and surrounded by flowers and richly patterned red carpets.

Inside lies the body of Mumtaz Qadri, a former policeman whose recent hanging for murder suddenly galvanized the mass forces of Pakistan's religious right into a fresh, potentially destabilizing, confrontation with the state.

As soon as the pink-clad Ayesha Mumtaz steps out of her car, word of her arrival spreads along the street like a forest fire. Storekeepers begin shooing away customers, hauling down the shutters, and heading into the shadows in the hope that Mumtaz's scrutinizing eye will not fall on them.

These traders would sooner lose business than risk a visit from a woman whose campaign to clean up the kitchens and food factories of Pakistan has made her a national celebrity, nicknamed "The Fearless One."

It doesn't matter where you are in the world, pretty safe to say we all hate getting stuck in traffic. Some places, though, are more difficult than others. NPR's Philip Reeves sent us his thoughts on the gridlock that plagues Kabul, Afghanistan.

Exercising the constitutional right to vote in Pakistan can sometimes come at a painful price. Fouzia Talib says she has become a social outcast overnight. People are abusing her with such ferocity that she has temporarily left home to seek refuge elsewhere.

Hassina Sarwari is waiting to go home. She fled her city when the Taliban captured it more than a month ago. They ransacked her house, burned down her office and stole her laptop and passport.

Sarwari is a prominent women's rights activist from Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan.

Afghan government forces have since regained control of the city, but she says it's still too dangerous for her and her children to return. She has heard the Taliban are threatening to execute her in public.

History has not been kind to the people who scratch out a living in Gwadar, on the arid coastline of the Arabian Sea.

They have received a few exotic visitors over the years, including Alexander the Great's army and marauding Portuguese explorers. For a couple of centuries, their land belonged to sultans in Oman, just across the ocean.

But the world has mostly passed Gwadar by, preferring gentler and more prosperous pastures to the dust, sand and jagged mountains of what is now southwestern Pakistan.